Now isn’t this charming? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen people attempt to imply that arcade racers with shooting basically got made because someone wanted ‘Mario Kart, only with weapons’, and Supercars II is… well, Mario Kart with weapons, basically. In Half-Life 2.
Okay, let’s have the correct description this time, now it’s been pointed out I should be registered legally blind. It’s a remake of a game which originally appeared on the Commodore Amiga some years back, a top down racer in the grand tradition of Super Sprint – see, I do know what I’m talking about, honest – where you drove your fancy ve-hickle contraptions round and round a track and shot repeatedly at each other.
It’s… I really don’t mean this to sound patronising, so sorry if it comes across this way! But the way it’s cheerfully slapped together any old how genuinely feels like part of its charm, from the Mode 7 graphics to the Outrun-esque splash screen to the lack of any collisions to the way the weapons are literally Half-Life 2 rocket launchers bolted onto the (totally incongruous) car bodies (much like the original box art way back in the day).
It’s been going a while, and the latest improvements involve a comprehensive overhaul of the scoring system, which supposedly frees up lots more resources for better performance overall. You can take a look at the current trailer, like so:
and dream of someone sticking that fat little plumber in there, so you can treat him to the business end of a heat-seeking missile. This is how we do it outside the Mushroom Kingdom! Snarl.
The ModDB page for Supercars II can be found here.
Not escaped from SNES, more from AMIGA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Cars_II). Its a 3D Remake that could be great if they could keep the top down view.
Ack! God, I totally misread the description – I thought it was a remake of another mod, not a 16-bit game. That’s what happens when you try and work on two sites at once. Thanks for the correction, I’ll rewrite it.
Now that’s awesome!
I always wonder why the whole combat racing thing never took off and we aren’t drowning in a flood of car shooty mods. There was Quake Rally, the update for Quake 3 made by different people, that one for UT2k4 and, umm, someone help me out here.
I don’t know about the quake engine, but the source engine is really almost literally incapable of having cars in multiplayer. You really have to rewrite almost the whole physics for it to work properly.
“that one for UT2k4 and, umm, someone help me out here.”
On UT2004 you had Unwheel, Carball, Unreal Demolition, RC Minimod and Unreal Speed (not sure about it, it was a UT2003 mod).
RoadKill Warriors permitted some driving experience too.
Concerning other engines, there were some other mods with cars like HL Rally, Shift On HL², DIPRIP, etc. There were some others on Far Cry, BF1942.
Cheerful indeed :)
Rest assured, the topdown view has always been optional, but for video purposes the 3rd-person camera made more impact.
Thanks for taking the time to review it, it’s good to get a little following out there! Better than other news sites which merely copy&paste, with a link.
Llama